ing, gained those hearts, which his presence intimidated. IIe had a step and deportment which could suit only him and his rank, and which would have been ridiculous in any other person.. The embarrassment, which he occasioned to those who spoke to him, flattered that secret satisfaction with which he felt his own superiority. The old officer, who was confounded, and faultered in asking him a favour, and not being able to conclude his discourse, said to him, "Your majesty, I hope, will believe that I do not thus tremble before your enemies, had no difficulty to obtain what he demanded." Happy would it have been, Ambrose, for most of the potentates of modern Europe, had they inherited from nature, and improved by art, those external graces which, as in women, so much attract the sympathy and admiration of mankind. Of all the kings whom BUONAPARTE has pushed from their throne, how few, like Cæsar, have thought of falling gracefully! You and I have seen the faces of some of them, and the portraits of the rest. And what do they in general exhibit? Meanness of figure, and vacant imbecility of countenance. SHAKSPEARE shewed his knowledge of human nature, when he exhibited RICHARD the Third, the English usurper, with a crookback. No mental deformity could have made him half so odious to the spectator. His MACBETH is also an usurper and a murderer, but his well-shaped limbs set him much straighter with the audience, and though he excites horror, he never provokes contempt. Whence this strange disposition in mankind to dispense with talents and virtues in the great, and to be attracted by mere external qualifications. LEWIS the Fourteenth marched to his throne with the strut of Pyrrhus, in the Andromaque of RACINE; and his subjects shouted applause? LEWIS the Sixteenth walked across the Thuilleries with the figure and gait of a substantial grazier, and all Paris tittered. How short the interval between ridicule and revolt! The poor monarch lost his head, from the ungracefulness of his heels. A friend of mine was some years ago in the Haymarket Theatre, when the late PRINCE OF Orange, then recently driven from Holland, entered the stage box. The audience arose, and greeted him with a round of applause. A graceful bow in return would almost have insured him the return. of the stadtholdership. He was too generous to take advantage of English good-nature, and contented himself with yawning and scratching his head. A general murmur of disgust was the con

sequence, and the poor somnambulist during the rest of his days reposed in Hampton Court palace, as quietly as the cartoons of RAPHAEL. The great are in general fully aware of this prejudice, and conduct themselves accordingly. They will sin against the whole Decalogue with infinitely less remorse than would be excited in their bosoms by violating one of the rules of LORD CHESTERFIELD. You have read the letters of that celebrated English nobleman, and are far more prepossessed in his favour than I am. He had more wit than the generality of men, more learning than the generality of peers; but his presumption was at least equal to his parts. His aversion to pedantry reminds me of the buck in the Connoisseur, who affected to despise what he never knew, and boasted of having forgotten all his Greek. I was yesterday in company with an old clergyman who knew him well; and he informed me that, with a meagre sallow visage, he fancied himself an Adonis, and that it was not in the power of a diminutive longwaisted figure to convince him that he was not an Apollo. His polish, his learning, and his dwarfishness, might well entitle them to the appellation of a gilt and lettered edition of the Pocket Peerage. His blind affection for an illegitimate cub, whom all the eloquence of his tongue, and his pen could never lick into shape, has often been the theme of ridicule; but the circumstance which strikes me with the most force in perusing his letters, is his extraordinary forgetfulness of the birth and condition of the petit STANHOPE, whom he was tutoring. I really at first imagined that it was the heir to his title and estate, whom he was instructing how to carry his coronet in the most graceful manner. How great my surprise on finding all these fine rules for governing princes and cabinets thrown away upon the clumsy offspring of an illicit amour! Even in England, where commerce is as great a leveller as a garden-roller, three things are necessary to compose a gentleman; respectable birth, good education, and polished manners. The two last of these requisites LORD CHESTERFIELD laboured to impart the first it was not quite so easy to bestow. In Germany, as it then was, no man of dubious birth could have thrust his nose into polite society, without the risk of having it tweaked. A youth of similar origin was lately in a mixed society in London, entertaining the company with a narrative of his noble father's exploits, when a surly old pindaric poet cut him short with the following request: "My

dear sir, you have given us a great many anecdotes of your father, suppose you now give us a few of your mother." Striking indeed must a nobleman be, if one of his weakest bye-blows is to be considered powerful enough to knock down the barriers of civilized society.

MR. VALENTINE GREEN ;

ON HIS BIRTH-PLACE.

In consequence of the note subjoined to Mr. GREEN's memoirs, (see this Volume, p. 8.) which stated that he was not a native of Warwickshire, but born in Hales Owen; Mr. G. has written us a letter, the material part of which we readily insert.

To the Editor of the MONTHLY MIRROR.

SIR,

After stating, as you had correctly done, that on my authority, you had asserted that I am a native of Warwickshire, (an authority which I should have hoped would have been sufficiently satisfactory, as I must naturally be thought to know something of the matter,) your having suffered a commentator, whom you do not name, under that advantage, to give me a public, and (as I feel it) a rude contradiction of that fact, on mere hear-say-evidence only, is a breach of order and decorum, I was not prepared to expect. It, however, demands a reply, and it shall have what I believe will be considered as a decisive one.

In a word, therefore, sir, I hereby affirm that every syllable from the inverted commas in the third line of that note, to the period in the third line from the bottom, both inclusive, aš far as your learned friend meant it to apply to me as a member of the family of the Greens, of Hales-Owen,, or in any wise as a relative of that family, is an entire fiction, and utterly void of truth. The concluding sentence of that note, is indeed but too true.

I am, sir,

(Maugre all your learned friend has said, or may hereafter

say to the contrary)

London, Aug. 12, 1809.

51, Upper Titchfield-Street,

Marylebone.

Your humble servant,

VALENTINE GREEN,

A Native of Warwickshire.

Now, the Editor has merely to remark, that if SWIFT could prove that a man was dead who entered into a controversy with him to prove that he was not, our very intelligent friend might surely dispute this point without despair of success-for as to a man's native place, his father, or even his mother, he himself must at his getting, or at his coming into the world, have been in a very ill-condition to judge, and it might indeed seem to be a gross piece of presumption in him to pretend naturally to know any thing of the matter. We have, however, submitted Mr. Green's argument to our friend, and he, waving all his apparently superior advantages, with respect to information, has, from the great singularity of this case, been inclined to admit Mr. Green's evidence as conclusive.

SCRAPIANA.

POPISHI SACRAMENT.

AN Egyptian, who resided some time in Italy, was seized with an inclination to see mass. On his return from it, he was asked for his observations on that solemn ceremony of the church. "It appears to me," replied, the Egyptian, " to be an act of devotion, totally devoid of charity; for one person was employed in eating and drinking, without offering to communicate this refreshment to any of the persons around him."

SAGE ADVICE TOO LATE.

A man who had climbed upa chesnut tree, had by carelessness missed his hold of one of the branches, and fell to the ground, with such violence as to break one of his ribs. A neighbour coming to his assistance, remarked to him, drily, "That had he followed his rule in these cases, he would have avoided this accident" "What rule do you mean?" said the other, indig nantly. This," replied the philosopher, "never to come down from a place faster than you go up."

POGGIUS.

CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU.

TRANSLATED FROM LES MEMOIRES DE MAD. DE WARENS.

DURING my residence at Annecy, M. de P. a curate in that quarter, recommended a young man to me, who had quitted Geneva, his native country, and who desired to turn Roman Catholic. Affected by his situation, I did him every service, in my power. My first care, I confess it freely, was to make him feel the despair. into which he plunged his family by abandoning his paternal abode; but as he persisted in his resolution, I sent him to Turin to a monastery, where the proper instructions were given to those who wished to become Roman Catholics. After his abjuration, he passed some time at Piedmont, where I am assured that but for his inconstancy, fortune offered him more than one resource-his genius (and he had a great deal) being singularly affected by the perusal of romances, ran incessantly after the fairies he had contemplated in works of that description; so being constantly in expectation of an adventure, he could fix to nothing.

ROUSSEAU resembled no one-timid to an excess with regard to the fair sex, the success of his intrigue depended on his imagination, and according as it appeared to his romantic brain, he believed himself happy or unhappy. He had a variety of talent, which would have rendered him charming in society; but, as fable fills the fields with zephyrs and nymphs, in the hope of meeting with an immortal, he preferred solitude to the real pleasure of making himself agreeable by the exercise of a musical talent, which he possessed in a considerable degree, Though full of knowledge, he did not shine so much as others less informed than himself. Notwithstanding an abundance of fire, he seldom indulged in general conversation: if he trusted himself to a tête-àtête, he was soon drawn into enthusiastic reveries, his imagination transported him into enchanted palaces, and all that the poets have sung of the isle of Paphos, was far inferior to his delightful wanderings.

Can nature produce nothing perfect? Or does it please her to mingle with the gifts which she bestows on men of genius, acertain je ne sais quoi, which at times brings them down to the le

S-VOL. VI.